"The Mask", Starring: You and Me

It's been a few months, I know. My excitement at establishing a rhythm in my writing, providing incisive (if problematic) commentary on current events waned after a couple of weeks it seems, only to be replaced by a combination of confusion and frustration as to why I am not writing, and what is keeping me from doing it. And then I start thinking about it more and more, and my frustration grows, and instead of writing I'm stuck in my own head trying t--

You know what? Let's not draw too deeply from that particular Freudian well, ok?

And why should we, right? Things have certainly not improved since we last saw one another: police violence against African Americans is escalating, with the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd a couple months ago, the attempted murder of Jacob Blake just the other day in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and everything in between. 

"How can this continue to happen?", the kind person in the back of your mind and heart might be saying. You may fall deeper into despair with every report of police violence, and you may worry for yourselves, your friends, or your children when they (we) take to the streets to protest. It can be scary. And frankly, as violence escalates amid a Federal reaction that actively encourages police brutality rather than deny its existence*, we all have a right to be scared. 



And not to pile on, but we also have to think about our current pandemic reality, and how that affects the ways in which we as people relate to one another. Yes, you see the picture-- I am talking about masks; but I am also talking about communication. 
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I may be dating myself here, or maybe I am just a lover of classic movies from the early to mid-nineties, but I really enjoyed watching The Mask. Once you get over the exaggerated physical comedy and problematic accents of Jim Carrey in this role, you start thinking about the Mask itself, and what you realize about halfway through the movie is that the power of the Mask is that it turns you into an all-powerful caricature of who you really are on the inside. When you put on "the mask," rather than hiding who you really are (as masks do), it does the opposite, and shows it to the world. And of course, along with it, a lot of fart jokes and impromptu musical numbers, which to my mind explains its relatively short life on VHS, DVD, or video over the past 25 years, only remaining on the shelves of folks who have a lizard or alien fetish. 

Anyway, unlike Jim Carrey's "mask" in 1994, the masks we wear today actually drive us deeper into ourselves. Combine that with the recent shelter-in-place, quarantine, working remotely from home, and the inevitable zoom meetings that are supposed to take the place of human interaction, and it becomes clear that our isolation from the public sphere (to whatever degree) has turned us into actual isolationists. The world/country/city/neighborhood had already been on edge for years, but now, whatever fractured sense of community that had been holding us together is now about to break. All of those moments of kindness, humanity, or connection that people once had in public has been replaced by tension, suspicion, and fear. And we react to our tension, suspicion, and fear by not only returning to the places we feel safe, but also into mindsets that offer us the security that human interaction once offered. 

Soon, not being able to know your neighbor will turn into not wanting to know your neighbor; violations of the six foot rule will turn into a social norm rather than a health precaution. And worst of all, we will stop losing the ability to empathize with the people we encounter in our daily lives-- or just as bad, no one will be able to recognize empathy, even when it is right in front of them. This is incredibly sad, but it is also dangerous. 

George Floyd, Jacob Blake-- these are just the latest in what can safely be counted as tens of thousands of lynchings of African Americans that have occurred in the past century, and they are all connected. Perhaps some things have changed politically and socially, but the violence and its foundations in greed, wealth, and white supremacy remain the same. The wounds remain open, but we heal in small ways by being present for one another, showing each other our pain, our wounds, tending to them-- tending to one another, sometimes in ways that are not perceptible for years, or generations. And we also heal by sharing our willingness to fight against racial violence that has been embedded in over 400 years of white supremacy-- a racist system awards privilege and entitlement unearned by the folks who hold it. We need to be able to show one another that we are in this fight together. 

But we can't show each other right now. Because if we take off our masks, we might die. 

I'm not gonna lie; there are no easy solutions to this. Living in a pandemic means that we have to stop the transmission of the virus, and to do that, we need masks. We wear the masks, and instead of being our best inner selves, like Jim Carrey, by default we can be perceived by others as all of the worst things that others think of us, even if we don't want to be. 

My concern is that between the pandemic and (legitimate) social unrest, there will be a rise in violence, both from the state and its citizenry. The current isolationism we are experiencing is not geographical, it is more individualized. We won't be seeing north versus south, because our isolation is occurring in our homes, our social spheres, and our minds. So how will the violent divide play out? My best guess is that the violence will be confusing, and not easily identified for what it is. Mistakes in identifying so-called "enemies" will be commonplace, and as a mentioned earlier, people will revert into spaces in which they feel safe, and comfortable, which in the outside world will cause a certain amount of chaos. In this chaos I am proposing, I suspect that a strong leader may point to all of this and suggest that we need someone strong to bring "law and order" back to America. Yes, predictably, fear is what I believe will re-elect the current White House resident, even if it is mobilized in a way that we don't yet recognize. And ultimately, his winning strategy is going to be taking advantage of our collective fear of COVID-19, him, and most of all, one another. 

No happy ending this time, except to say that all of this does not mean we stop fighting. We never stop fighting, and we never stop being who we are, finding better ways to communicate, finding ways to come together-- it is possible, but it will be a challenge. I hope we are up to it, because we only have a few months. 

*Who would have thought that politicians saying, "police brutality is bad, in those rare moments that it happens," would be "the good ole' days?" We are truly living in a surrealist nightmare worse than anything even himself Dalí could cook up. 

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